He was able to achieve that dream in the summer of 2008, when he walked from Rosh Hanikra (once known as the Ladder of Tyre) at the border of Lebanon to Israel's boundary with Gaza.
As a reporter who had covered Israel and the Middle East for European and American television since 1973, Fletcher knew how easily wars, bombings and terrorist attacks in Jerusalem and the West Bank hit the news.
What he wanted to explore was a different Israel: the area within 10 miles of the coast where 70% of Israel's Jews and Arabs live in relative peace; the Israel that ranks as the world's second largest per capital buyers of books in the world, and where even small towns have major orchestras.
Traveling with a backpack, bottles of water and a lot of sunscreen, his walking tour took two weeks. It included the ancient fortress city of Acre, which had seen the arrivals -- and departures -- of Alexander the Great, Richard the Lion-Hearted, Saladin and Napoleon; hilly Haifa; booming Tel Aviv; sleepy Ashkelon; and three kibbutzim.
His book would have been a slender one if he had just stuck to observing as he traveled. Instead, he chose to address issues challenging Israeli society in each of the 10 sections of the book. These include Israel's changing demographics, the challenges of being an Israeli Arab, the near death and reformation of the kibbutzim, changing attitudes toward military service, and the legacy of the Holocaust. He doesn't take positions on these issues; he lets the people he interviews speak for themselves. These discussions give a nice depth to his presentation of Israel.
After his walk, he spent another two years writing and doing additional research for the book. He uses his extensive contacts as a journalist to gain insights into the issues he writes about. He went back to visit Tel Aviv to explore its famous night life in more depth. He also returned to Ashkelon in Southern Israel as a correspondent when Israel began retaliating against bombs from Hamas. While these add richness to the book, it sometimes gets confusing figuring out what he did while walking and what he did later.
Fletcher is a good writer and has a gift for getting people to talk to him. His book is filled with characters ranging from the now deceased Eli Avivi, who created a "micronation" near the ruins of Achziv; to Abdu Salvatore Matta, a Christian Arab tour guide and storyteller in Acre; to Ran Ronen, who reimagined the kibbutz; to the elderly Sonya Arieli, an inn keeper in Nahariya who had little positive to say about anyone; to Yuval Eilan, who runs a training program to prepare Israeli young people mentally and physically to pass the entrance requirements for Israel's elite military units.
Walking Israel won the 2010 National Jewish Book Award for Contemporary Jewish Life and Practice.
About the Author: Martin Fletcher (1947 - )
His parents were Austrian Jews who escaped to London, where Fletcher was born. He graduated from the University of Bradford in 1970.
He has received five Emmy Awards for his work on the first and second Palestinian uprisings, Rwanda, Kosovo and Israel's trauma medicine, as well as many other U.S. and international awards.
He is the author of Breaking News, about being a foreign correspondent, and four novels: The List (2011), Jacob's Oath (2013), The War Reporter (2015) and Promised Land (2018).
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